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Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600-Present explores the relationship between the sea and culture from the early modern period to the present. The collection uses the concept of the 'sea narrative' as a lens through which to consider the multiple ways in which the sea has shaped, challenged, and expanded modes of cultural representation to produce varied, contested and provocative chronicles of the sea across a variety of cultural forms within diverse socio-cultural moments. Sea Narratives provides a unique perspective on the relationship between the sea and cultural production: it reveals the sea to be more than simply a source of creative inspiration, instead showing how the sea has had a demonstrable effect on new modes and forms of narration across the cultural sphere, and in turn, how these forms have been essential in shaping socio-cultural understandings of the sea. The result is an incisive exploration of the sea's force as a cultural presence.
List of contents
Introduction: The literature, history and culture of the sea, 1600-present by Charlotte Mathieson. - 1. A Need to Narrate? Early Modern French Accounts of Atlantic Crossings by Michael Harrigan. - 2. 'A sea of stories': Maritime imagery and imagination in Napoleonic narratives of war captivity by Elodie Duché. - 3. 'Through Dustless Tracks' for African Rights: Narrative Currents and Political Imaginaries of Solomon Plaatje's 1914 Sea Voyage by Janet Remmington. - 4. 'From Icy Backwater to Nuclear Waste Ground': The Russian Arctic Ocean in the Twentieth Century by Eva-Maria Stolberg. - 5. Shores of history, islands of Ireland: Chronotopes of the sea in the contemporary Irish novel by Roberta Gefter Wondrich. - 6. Women at Sea: Locating and Escaping Gender on the Cornish Coast in The Loving Spirit and Frenchman's Creek by Gemma Goodman. - 7. Travelling across Worlds and Texts in A. S. Byatt's Sea Narratives by Barbara Franchi. - 8. Unveiling the anthropo(s)cene: Burning seas, cinema of mourning and the globalisation of apocalypse by Sayandeb Chowdhury. - 9. The Tolerant Coast by Isaac Land
About the author
Charlotte Mathieson is Teaching Fellow at Newcastle University, UK, and previously researched at the University of Warwick, UK. Her publications include
Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation(2015).
Summary
Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600-Present explores the relationship between the sea and culture from the early modern period to the present. The collection uses the concept of the ‘sea narrative’ as a lens through which to consider the multiple ways in which the sea has shaped, challenged, and expanded modes of cultural representation to produce varied, contested and provocative chronicles of the sea across a variety of cultural forms within diverse socio-cultural moments. Sea Narratives provides a unique perspective on the relationship between the sea and cultural production: it reveals the sea to be more than simply a source of creative inspiration, instead showing how the sea has had a demonstrable effect on new modes and forms of narration across the cultural sphere, and in turn, how these forms have been essential in shaping socio-cultural understandings of the sea. The result is an incisive exploration of the sea’s force as a cultural presence.
